The Prosciutto Project Blog

What developers think about fragmentation

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:03:14 -0200

Check this interesting survey http://tweetalink.com/go/iQIr.

You'll like to see what other devs think, love and hate about the platforms they work on.

Just an extract on the love/hate part:

"What do developers hate about their platform? Well, most of them seemed peeved with the difficulties they faced in reaching the market; a reason that is mostly relevant to the way the market is set up (or was setup � in the pre- iPhone App Store era), rather than a fault in the platform. The main inherent fault most people found was the disparity between emulator and device performance, a view shared by all platform users except Android. Android users were also pleased with the production cost of the apps, as well as the support their platform offered. Unsurprisingly, less than half of the developers found something bad to say about their platform."

Cheers,

Mario

Chau 2009, Hola 2010

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:27:42 -0200

Este post va en castellano porque, la verdad, no estoy seguro que algun anglo est� leyendo esto. A ver, fijemosnos en Google Analytics... dice que s�, de hecho la mayoria son de paises que no hablan espa�ol, aunque no son wow cuantos.

1. China

2. United States

3. Japan

4. Argentina

5. India

6. Canada

7. Vietnam

8. Spain

9. United Kingdom

En fin esto va dedicado a las visitas argentinas y las espa�olas :p

Llega fin de a�o y todo el mundo hace balances, y yo me veo casi obligado a escribir este post. Medio que tengo ganas de escribir un mont�n de cosas pero medio tambi�n que tengo ganas de usar este tiempo en echar c�digo para Prosciutto :).

Asique va rapido en resumen de lo mas importante que pas� este a�o:

1) Febrero 17-21: Mobile World Congress. La primera vez que voy. Ojal� pueda ir de nuevo y todos los a�os. Llevado por Nokia por el Calling All Innovators, que ganamos en nuestra categoria en la region Americas y 3ros en la global. Inolvidable experiencia, donde conoc� otros 10 emprendedores / desarrolladores de todas partes del mundo.

2) Mayo 28: Palermo Valley Mobile Sessions. Present� Prosciutto en la sesi�n inicial. Hasta me hice imprimir tarjetas de Prosciutto y todo, para entregar a la audiencia o a quien se acercara. En ese evento conoci al Arquitecto Bravo, con todo el respeto y admiraci�n, un loco que est� armando un proyecto integrador de tecnolog�as que es simplemente asombroso: estan construyendo un autom�vil industria nacional, con un controlador central basado en Android OS. Me saco el sombrero. http://www.arqbravodesign.com.ar/

Conoci tambien a Rodolfo Llanos, fundador de www.soloingles.com. Un fenomeno!

3) Mayo en general: Particip� de las actividades de Embajadores NSeries de Nokia, un lindisimo grupo y una idea fant�stica de Orly Crist�falo (twitter: @orlycristofalo), y un producto fenomenal de Nokia: el N96. Pueden ver una nota sobre esto aqui.

4) Junio: llevamos a Prosciutto al siguiente paso, al hacerlo (casi) totalmente configurable. Te permite manejar el footprint de memoria, que tul. Articulo aqui. Tambien, integramos Prosciutto con Hecl, de manera que si hay algo que no se nos ocurri� hacer dentro de Prosciutto, lo puedas hacer con Hecl sin tener que recompilar. Comportamiento din�mico que le dicen. Aunque todavia no hice nada particularmente �til con esto, es una posibilidad super poderosa :).

5) Julio / Agosto: La lucha contra Blackberry. Finalmente lo hicimos andar, pero hubo que hacer un refactoring inmenso. Todavia tengo secuelas de esta decisi�n de refactoring.

Conoci a Bruno Rovagnati de Globant gracias a Rodo Llanos. Una persona de una claridad mental absoluta, humilde y con grandes conocimientos.

6) Septiembre: Agregamos Location Based Services y video a Prosciutto. Tom� mate, qu� nos falta? :p

PyCon 2009. Se hace la primer conferencia de Python en espa�ol, en Buenos Aires en la Universidad de Belgrano. La calidad de las charlas fue sencillamente del m�s alto nivel. El esfuerzo de organizaci�n de los chicos de PyAr con Facundo Batista a la cabeza, fue descomunal. Lean este post de Facu en su blog: http://www.taniquetil.com.ar/plog/post/1/425

7) Octubre: lanzamos la serie Mobile Monday Tech Talks en Buenos Aires, junto con mi amigo Fabio Caballero y gracias a toda la estructura montada con gran esfuerzo de Antonio Pe�a y el capitulo tradicional de MoMo. Hicimos un primer evento con 60 personas y una charla magn�fica de Maximiliano Firtman. La organizaci�n "a pulm�n" es agotadora! pero el resultado se aprecia :).

Otra cosa que "termin� de pasar" en Octubre, pero en realidad pas� durante todo 2008 y 2009: finalmente terminamos nuestra tesis de ingenier�a con mis amigos Nico Gnecchi y Mariano Gasparini, y el aguante de nuestras novias, esposas e hijos. La experiencia de trabajar juntos en algo totalmente innovador ha sido gloriosa. Se extra�a volver a trabajar con ellos!

8) Noviembre: hicimos una charla especial de MoMo Tech Talks orientada a Android. Con la presencia de grosos como James Yum de Google, y German Greco de Motorola. Vinieron 250 personas. Mil gracias a Guillermo Winicki y la UTN por prestarnos las instalaciones par poder hacer el evento alli. Sencillamente, estuvo espectacular, con contenido t�cnico y de valor para la audiencia. Cuando iniciamos la serie Tech Talks, nunca pens� que fuera posible juntar a 250 personas en un mismo lugar, con una propuesta que saliera de nosotros :)

Tambien hicimos un evento especial para el lanzamiento de Nokia Calling All Innovators regional. Muy buenas las charlas de Fernando Freytes de Nokia, que nos sac� todas las dudas a los que queremos participar :)

Mi gran amigo el Turco se fue a vivir a Esquel. Lo vamos a extra�ar un mont�n, pero por suerte con internet, a veces se acortan un poco las distancias.

9) Diciembre: Sin dudas el h�roe del a�o es Rodolfo Llanos con su movida 150x300 . Fundador de www.soloingles.com, les recomiendo que lean sus posts y lo sigan en Twitter (@soloenglish), es una m�quina de empujar y hacer cosas, que contagia.

Que puedo decir, termina el a�o. La verdad que mirando para atr�s, pas� de todo en 2009. Podr�a decir "hicimos de todo", pero me sale m�s "pas� de todo". Es como que algunas cosas uno las busca y otras te salen.Sin dudas algo que aprendi a valorar es la fuerza de las personas que me rodean y me empujan a seguir adelante, en especial a mi esposa que tiene una paciencia y voluntad infinitas.

Un agradecimiento especial a don Juan Matus por sus ense�anzas ;). Creo que ha sido la �nica literatura no t�cnica que me devor� este a�o.

Saludos a todos y un Muy Feliz A�o Nuevo (asi, con may�sculas en cada palabra)

Mario

MOMO Tech Talks: Android as a development platform

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:19:21 -0200

MOMO Buenos Aires presents:

�Android as a development platform�

Meet industry leaders to discover the Android platform and state-of-the-art Android devices.

Buenos Aires, November 3rd, 2009.- Mobile Monday Buenos Aires (www.momobuenosaires.com) invites you to the second MOMO Tech Talks event. This event will take place next Monday, November 16th at 7 PM at the Aula Magna at the Facultad Regional Buenos Aires de la Universidad Tecnol�gica Nacional (UTN), Medrano 951, Ciudad Aut�noma de Buenos Aires.

This event will be fully dedicated to Android, the new operating system built by Google, with the aim to provide professionals with the latest news and information about this exciting development platform. The event will be attended by two outstanding speakers. James YUM, team member of the Android Development Program team at Google, USA, and German Greco, Regional Product Manager at Motorola. Yum will offer his talk: �Inside the Android Application Framework�. Greco, on the other hand, will refer to �The next generation of Android phones�.

Moreover, a selected group of local developers will showcase their Android-based projects.

The event is free for everyone. However, there�s limited space at the venue, so previous registering is required. You can register by completing the registration form at Mobile Monday Buenos Aires website (www.momobuenosaires.com) or at http://tinyurl.com/momotechtalks

This event wouldn�t be possible without the support of Universidad Tecnol�gica Nacional (UTN), Facultad Regional Buenos Aires.

Main Sponsors: Buongiorno, Gemalto, IKEN, Banco Galicia, El Cronista, CodaMation, Disney Mobile Studios, Turner, and MTV.

About MobileMonday TechTalks

Open to each and every actor in the country�s mobile industry, the event series will be highly oriented to whom are considered the major figures in innovative mobile applicacion and services development, thus proposing both a monthly space to share experiences with colleagues and a virtual community to facilitate communication among them.

About MobileMonday

MobileMonday Buenos Aires (www.momobuenosaires.com) is the argentine chapter of MobileMonday, the global community grouping innovators, visionaries and executives from the international mobile industry.

Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets. It counts with more than 110.000 industry professionals who gather regularly in the 60 most important cities of the world. Mobile Monday is organized by a group of dedicated volunteers from around the world. The organization produces more than 700 events per year around the world. Each chapter has a local website, which altogether forms the www.mobilemonday.net network.

For further press information:

+54 11 4961 6172 or +54 11 4962 1856; rsvp@momobuenosaires.com; press@momobuenosaires.com

MoMo Buenos Aires Tech Talks is a success

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:32:01 -0200

via www.movilsur.com.ar

Different to the traditional MobileMonday Buenos Aires meetings, the first MoMo TechTalk meeting performed yesterday at the UTN (Universidad Tecnol�gica Nacional) had a more intimate and interactive tone, more often seen in a college class. The developers Fabio Caballero and Mario Zorz presented the new Tech Talks series, with a focus on mobile development.

The questions of the audience, nearly 60 people with a strong technical background, aimed at learning more of the nature of these talks and how they will develop as compared to traditional MoMo meetings. Antonio Pe�a, president of MoMo Argentina, explained that a space dedicated to technical people was a pending issue among MoMo enthusiasts. �You are the ones who make things happen�, he said. He also thanked the organizational effort made by Caballero and Zorz.

Maximiliano Firtman, mobile developer and Director at IT Master Institute, spoke about the importance of mobile web and widgets, which are installable applications developed using web techonology. �As opposed to native appliactions, widgets tend to be more multiplatform and that can be extremely useful in the next few years� � he explained. �For some developers, it�s easier and faster�.

His presentation � ver clear and explanative, as many of the people in the audience agreed -, was a brief version of another one Firtman presented earlier this year at InsideMobile, in San Jose, California. �Widgets are ideal for web 2.0� �he said � �but maybe not so good for building games. It definitely is better in the sense of the time involved in the development process and portability�. To watch the presentation follow this link

Afterwards Bryan Tafel, director at Sensebyte Insomnia talked about today�s challenges in mobile development. His talk was a mixture of the technical issues that arise at the moment of writing code, with issues related to the business as well.

In the technical part he made special emphasis on emulators and other tools for measuring the handsets� overall performance at development time. �When you run your application on the emulator everything is nice � he said -, but it behaves differently on the real handset. The emulator can be used to test 75% of the app, but there is a margin left, and there are tools to help developers minimize the remaining margin�.

Regarding the business approach, Tafel talked about what he referred to as the corporate approach, where he gained most of his experience with his company. �There the main goal is to evangelize � he said-. Companies still don�t see their competitors have mobile solutions and it�s hard for them to make the first step. The whole effort sits around explaining ROI.�

He also talked about the SaaS approach, or Software as a Service. �But here the problem is the uncertainty we have. You have to have volume, and there are plenty of handset models and you are forced to get the most out of them. The risk still seems too high and therefore the kind of debates as this one tonight are good�.

In the end, Caballero announced - for the pleasure of the audience - that the next MoMo Tech Talks meeting could be the next November 16th, this time at the Aula Magna at UTN, focused on two hot issues: Google/Andoid and Motorola.

MOMO Tech Talks

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:42:44 -0200

MOMO Buenos Aires presents

�"MOMO TechTalks, the first community of practice on mobile development in LatinAmerica �

This new MOMO Buenos Aires division is an effort aiming at producing technical events, focused on the issues related to mobile development as a backbone to our industry.

Buenos Aires, October 8th, 2009.- Mobile Monday Buenos Aires (www.momobuenosaires.com) invites you to the launch of MOMO TechTalks first event of a series. This first event will be held at the Universidad Tecnologica Nacional (UTN) Facultad Regional Buenos Aires premises, located at Medrano 951, Ciudad Aut�noma de Buenos Aires, next October 26^th, 7 PM (GMT-3).

This event will be the official presentation of the community of practice, MOMO TechTalks, which will pivotate around mobile development and under the Mobile Monday Buenos Aires umbrella.

Communities of practice are colllaborative, informal networks constituted with the objective of developing shared understandings about specialized knowledge, sharing the lessons learned by means of the reflection on real life experiences.

This division will be coordinated by Mario Zorz and Fabio Caballero, two renowned names in the industry given their proven knowledge of the mobile development world.

In this first gathering MOMO Tech Talks will host Maximiliano Firtman, Director at IT Master Professional Training, Forum Nokia Champion, with his talk entitled �Mobile Web & Multiplatform Widgets". Also we will have Bryan Tafel, CTO at Insomnia Business Solutions, who will share his experiences in his talk entitled �Mobile development challenges� .

The event is free for everyone. However, there�s limited space at the venue, so previous registering is required. You can register by sending an email to rsvp@momobuenosaires.com or calling +54 11 4961 6172 or +54 11 4962 1856. You will be required to show an ID at the door.

*************************************************

This event wouldn�t be possible without the support of Universidad Tecnol�gica Nacional (UTN), Facultad Regional Buenos Aires.

Main Sponsors: Buongiorno, Gemalto, IKEN, Banco Galicia, El Cronista, CodaMation, Disney Mobile Studios, Turner, and MTV.

*************************************************

About MobileMonday

For further press information:

+54 11 4961 6172 or +54 11 4962 1856; rsvp@momobuenosaires.com; press@momobuenosaires.com

Prosciutto 2.1 released

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:34:46 -0300

NEW!: Prosciutto 2.1 released!
This release ships with:

-Location Based Services integration (JSR 179)
-new config attributes for LBS reading timeout
-wrapper buttons memory footprint control
-softkey mapper
-BlackBerry support
-debug form
-stringfilter: use any of these tags in your buttons text, which will be replaced by the corresponding values each time the button is rendered on screen: @@latitude@@ @@longitude@@ @@time@@ @@date@@ @@timestamp@@ @@debug@@ @@freemem@@
-table arrangement for buttons
-usermessage for showing customized messages on the "loading..." screens
-messageinbox for customizing behavior by sending behavior messages to your UI objects
-video playing features

We are going to build several copy/paste examples to showcase all of Prosciutto's features.

Enjoy! :)

Mario

Blackberry meets Prosciutto

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:38:22 -0300

Finally! I got Prosciutto to run on Blackberry :)

This is a very early stage, but here's a screenshot of the BlackBerry 8120 running the HelloProsciutto demo:

Cheers,

Mario

Mission Impossible: Blackberry

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:11:48 -0300

As you know from my previous post, I've installed Eclipse Pulsar on my dev machine. The latest version of Eclipse is 3.5 as of this post, so I downloaded the package and pretty much to my (good) surprise everything goes quite smooth and I could write a simple hello world in a matter of minutes, it even detected the SDKs I had already installed (Nokia's and Motorola's, etc.) and I saw they have some nice features for code completion, style, and refactoring and optimisation tools, not to count the Subversion and Trac integration plugins (which I haven't tested out yet, but will soon).

Now, remember my goal is to make Prosciutto run on BlackBerry devices. So I was eager to install the Eclipse plugin for BlackBerry, so I followed instructions there. Unfortunately I get this error from the Eclipse software updater:

Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
Software being installed: BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse 1.0.0.67 (net.rim.EclipseJDE.feature.group 1.0.0.67)
Missing requirement: BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse 1.0.0.67 (net.rim.EclipseJDE.feature.group 1.0.0.67) requires 'org.eclipse.core.resources [3.4.0,3.5.0)' but it could not be found

Ok... I have to say, after looking for anything like org.eclipse.core.resources, bundles, etc. I decided to google for it and I found this blog post from Carol Hamer (she humbly defines herself as "a software engineer living in Switzerland" but she also is a book writer from what I could see in her blog's about tab). Her post is only a month old, and she seems to have found the same issues.

Digging a little bit more, I found there's a ticket open in BlackBerry jira system (their bugtracker) which you can find here: https://www.blackberry.com/jira/browse/TOOL-14.

I urge you, the developer community, to enter such URL and please *vote for it to get fixed*.

Basically, there's still no support from Research In Motion for their plugin to work with Eclipse 3.5. :(

In the meantime, I will just download Eclipse 3.4 and set up everything I need (I don't know if Pulsar is available for Eclipse 3.4, let's see...), in order to continue these efforts.

All I can say as per now is RIM is definitely making it hard for developers to get things working, and that's the reason I think it's definitely worth to wirte about it so other's don't fall into the same problems, but also to make RIM aware what the development community has to say about it. Ultimately, we just want to make apps for their devices, so developer support should be a point in itself.

I'll keep you posted on any news

Cheers,

Mario

Eclipse Pulsar

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:31:53 -0300

The refactoring efforts have proven fruitful - to some extent. On one hand, I have code that is more readable and easier to understand. Also using the rapc tool from Research In Motion to produce a BlackBerry .cod file that wont' throw errors has been proven a possible path - once I separated everything into classes and kept each class under 512 words. Now I'm at a point where Prosciutto seems to run OK on the RIM platform, but, there's a minor issue: it just shows a blank screen. I know there's Prosciutto behind that blank screen because I can see the keypressed events sometime lead to what is expected (for example, blindly clicking on an Prosciutto editable button actually does show the extended TextBox lcdui class). On the other hand, I lost quite an amount of jar size savings by doing it the OO way: the Prosciutto engine itself has grown by 14% in size - and we are talking no new functionality, just refactoring for the sake of keeping class members to less than 512 words, just to workaroung BlackBerry's limitations.

That said, I needed debugging. I'm using RIM's JDE Component Package 4.5.0 for emulating the BlackBerry 8120 (also known as Pearl), and you know, there's 2 basic ways to debug your code on any emulator: either it supports some kind of debugging, such as the JDP (Java Platform Debugging Protocol) or anything else, or you can serve yourself of placing tons of System.err.println / System.out.println and find a way to read the stderr and stdout streams somehow.

Unfortunately none of these seemed easy on the Blackberry emulators. If you want to read your System.err.println statements output somewhere you need to attach the simulator to a debugger by means of the RIM's JDE JWDP module (which is basically the JDP debugger listener as implemented by RIM). So if I were to try it anyway, I say let's go for the full thing, as I'm attaching a debugger anyway.

To make a long story short, I will just say that RIM's tools just don't seem to work properly in any environment other than RIM's defined JDK or Eclipse.

As you may (or may not) know, I use a fancy text editor and just ant and antenna to do all the stuff I need in Prosciutto. This worked well with everything else, Nokia, Motorola, even Samsung and SonyEricsson emulators (both vendors base their emulators directly on Sun's Wireless Toolkit). But BlackBerry is not the case: attaching a debugger is a daunting task and it takes several minutes - a total waste of time.

So I decided to try Eclipse and the BlackBerry Eclipse plugin. That's when I came to know about Eclipse Pulsar. For a good initiative manifesto you can read this press release . This is quite interesting, and I'm happy more and more people (and vendors) are aiming at making developer's life easier.

I have just downloaded my Pulsar distribution and I'm about to test it out. I'll let you know my findings - keeping in mind my goal is to debug Prosciutto and make it run on BlackBerry.

Cheers,

Mario

Latest stable release

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:24:25 -0300

Dear Prosciutto enthusiasts,

I'm continuing the refactoring approach. I decided I will take it as far as I can to really see what the tradeoffs are.

I will make a major announcement soon (probably a package release); as of now revision 151 (latest stable release) has:

- table handling as in you can define a set of buttons arranged in rows of a table,
- a softkey mapper
- and LBS capabilities (yes! check the sample HelloProsciutto to see how you can read the underlaying device GPS capabilities)

among other tweaks such as thread handling optimisations (overall performance is better than older revisions).

For the latest stable release before phase 2 refactoring then, please checkout revision 151 from the SVN trunk folder.

Thanks,
Mario